TED 2010: How to Ace a TED Talk

LONG BEACH, California — Stephen Wolfram is standing in the lobby of the Long Beach Performing Arts Center. The physicist, CEO, and seeker of the computational basis of the universe is accepting kudos after completing a rite of passage for an internet age intellectual: a TED talk.

Slotted in the treacherous valley of the last session on Thursday — a little over halfway through a cerebral marathon of presentations that span medical procedures, contemplations of pollen, pie charts of global slavery, and a ukulele performance of “Bohemian Rhapsody” — Wolfram, a late addition to the program, has aced his performance.

The 2010 version of TED is the biggest yet and is on track to becoming the most successful. There are 1,400 people here in Long Beach, along with 500 at a satellite hookup in Palm Springs and thousands more participating in web streams in 75 countries.

But the overall quality has been high, beginning with a lucid and mind-opening explanation of behavioral economics by Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman and continuing with a provocative proposal by neuroscientist and professional atheist Sam Harris for an objective standard of morality.

The day before his speech, Wolfram shared a little on how he prepared. Wolfram is an experienced speaker, comfortable with product demos to geeks and equation-packed lectures to science conferences. But looking over previous TED talks, realized that this unique 18-minute genre has its own requirements. For one thing, there’s this unusual audience. “I’m surprised to see that half the people here know my career in some detail and the other half don’t know who I am,” he says.

We have heard a lot about the econo-cratic Davos Man, but TED Person is a human mosaic of scientist, businessperson, design consultant and movie star. The spa and the laboratory sometimes clash. One of the most extreme reactions I’ve ever heard from the TED crowd was during a video shown Thursday where a cute little mouse was nosing around a piece of cheese. We hear a big SNAP, and the screen goes black. The auditorium erupts in a huge collective gasp of shock as we see our furry friend pinned in a mousetrap, pathetically struggling to get out. (All ends well, as it turned out to be a funny commercial and the mouse did a superhero move to escape.)

Another instance of that clash occurs when journalist Michael Spector, in a forceful defense of reason, attacks not only know-nothings who reject scientific evidence that vaccines don’t cause autism, but know-nothings who buy billions of dollars’ worth of useless alternative medicines. Since some TEDsters apparently are in the latter group, Spector gets enthusiastic applause — and also a show of hands when Anderson asks if anyone was offended and enraged by his speech. Science is fine, but not when it messes with our illusions.

Wolfram also understands that to connect with the TED audience one best constructs a personal narrative. One contender for the best TED talk ever came a few TEDs ago when neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor’s described her near-fatal stroke — the professional part of her brain fluctuated between detached observation and panic while the rest of her mind melted into a blurry nirvana. The talk included candid revelation, medical peril, cutting-edge science, and a bit of mysticism. If she had included solar power and African child warriors, it would have been so perfect a TED talk that there would have been no need for others.

So when Wolfram takes the stage on Thursday — after a three-song performance by singer Andrew Bird — he frames the arc of his work from the point of view of his own discovery of how complicated things grow from simple rules. He quickly compresses decades of work into a few minutes and is soon demonstrating Wolfram Alpha, his computational “knowledge engine.”

While he speaks, an auto-run version of his Google-esque program handles weird queries for weird information. When his demo hits a software glitch, he mutters, “Oh, that’s bad,” but skillfully moves on. It helps humanize him, an important advantage for a guy who casually compares himself to Galileo. All of this helps the audience digest challenging content, especially when he gets to the point where he’s trying to model “candidate universes that aren’t obviously not our universe.”

Wolfram thankfully avoids two overused conventions of TED-speak. The first is the reference to “the people in this room,” with the word people often preceded by an adjective like “brilliant,” “generous” or “innovative.” Behind the flattery is a pitch to tap the brains and bucks of TEDsters for a cause, ranging from climate change to clean needle exchanges.

This year introduces another persistent phrase, inspired by the theme of this year’s conference: “What the World Needs Now.” Many speakers are ending their talks by asserting what the world needs now is everything from eradication of global slavery to cultivation of flesh-eating plants. Wolfram wraps his talk by saying that when it comes to trying to boil down the universe to a simple algorithm, “it’s almost embarrassing not to at least try.”

This delights TED’s master of ceremonies, Chris Anderson. “Just because someone has an ego,” he says, citing a writer whose name I can’t read from my scribbled notes, “doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”